Justin Ho

The reason the state hasn't plugged this well, it's really expensive.

Ted Bettner with the Ohio River Valley Institute estimates in his report that statewide, there's about $5 billion of plugging to do.

The older the well is...

The harder it is to fish everything out and clean it out and get to the bottom.

Most wells in the state are undocumented, but the number the state knows about has been going up, according to Bettner's report.

And that's actually good, according to Sarah Armitage, a Boston University professor who's researched the oil drilling industry.

The availability of federal funding to assist states with this cleanup process has increased the incentive for states to undertake this costly effort to go out and document their orphaned wells.

Because step one to solving the orphaned well problem is figuring out how big the problem is.

Step two is getting the money to plug the wells.

And so if the well becomes orphaned, the funds available to the state to cover plugging costs

are only a fraction of the actual costs incurred.

David McMahon, the lawyer, has been trying to get a bill passed in West Virginia that'll help fix that.

I'd say there is some hope, but getting anything through the legislature that portions of the oil and gas industry oppose is not going to be easy.

Lawmakers introduced the bill in February.

It would force drillers of new wells to set aside money in a bank account that'll cover the cost of plugging them later.

In Dunbar, West Virginia, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

I'm Amy Scott, and this week on our podcast, How We Survive, I travel to an undisclosed location in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about a controversial solution to the climate crisis.

It's called solar geoengineering, and it's basically a way to dim the sun in order to cool the planet.

Proponents view this as a necessary intervention.

Others are not convinced.